Sennacheribís Last Campaign

The last campaign of Sennacherib was directed not only
against Jerusalem, but also against Egypt and Ethiopia (Sudan)an
enterprising warrior, Tirhaka, who invaded Egypt from the Sudan, reinstated
Sethos, and put the occupant of the throne of Egypt, underling of Sennacherib,
to flight.

When Sennacherib came to Palestine for the second time,
Hezekiah refused to submit or to pay tribute. The Ethiopian king Tirhakah
(Taharka) stood together with his Egyptian confederate, Sethos, at the
border of Egypt, prepared to meet the threat. Sennacherib sent his messengers
to Hezekiah from Lachish and once more from Libnah to demand submission;
he also wrote him an ultimatum, and blasphemed the Hebrew God.

Then in a single night the Assyrian host, about 185,000
warriors, perished, destroyed by some natural cause.(1)

Herodotus (II. 141) relates this event and gives a version
he heard from the Egyptians when he visited their land two and a half
centuries after it happened. When Sennacherib invaded Pelusium, the priest-king
Sethos went with a weak army to defend the frontier. In a single night
hordes of field mice overran the Assyrian camp, devoured quivers, bowstrings
and shield handles, and put the Assyrian army to flight. Another version
was given by Berosus, the Chaldean priest of the third century before
the present era.

This event and the writings relating to it have been
investigated in Worlds in Collision, Part II, which deals with
the natural history of the period. A sequence of natural phenomena that
bewildered the world for almost a hundred years during the eighth century
and the beginning of the seventh is investigated and described in that
volume. With knowledge of the precise character and time of these physical
phenomena, an exact synchronism can be established; for the purposes of
the present book I borrow from Worlds in Collision the exact date:
Sennacheribs army was annihilated on the night of March 23, -687.
The calculations of modern historians who place the second invasion of
Judah by Sennacherib in -687 are correct. However if to harmonize the
involved chronological problems the debacle of Sennacheribs army
needs to be placed fifteen years earlier (not in -687 but in -701) and
the first invasion in -715 and the beginning of Hezekiahs reign
in -729, then I would need to change the date for the last global catastrophe
from -687 to -701 or -702.